Camille Pissarro Quotes

Drawing is feeling. Color is an act of reason.

Architects and painters know precisely what they are about as long as they deal with material phenomena.... But when they come to the aesthetics of their work, when they aim at a particular effect on the mind or on the senses, the rules dissolve into nothing but vague ideas.

Pure draughtsmen are philosophers and dialecticians. Colourists are epic poets.

Drawing is of the Spirit and color of the Senses.

Color, even more than drawing, is a means of liberation.

Drawing is not following a line on the model, it is drawing your sense of the thing.

I have always been interested in having people fall into the image and be aware of their reaction first, and then think about the style.

I've always been so surprised by how people interpret my photos in context.

Colors answer feeling in man; shapes answer thought; and motion answers will.

Art is when things appear rounded.

Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured.

You don't have to know anything about art to appreciate it or to look at it. There aren't any hidden secrets or things that you're supposed to understand.

The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions.. the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them. And if you say you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point.

Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed.

Drawing and color are not separate at all; in so far as you paint, you draw. The more color harmonizes, the more exact the drawing becomes. When the color achieves richness, the form attains its fullness also

Purer colors... have in themselves, independently of the objects they serve to express, a significant action on the feelings of those who look at them.

The starting point of a picture for any painter is a matter of colors and form...I believe that the poetry of art - if that is what one may call it - is a matter of animating these forms and colors.

By using patches of color and tone it is possible to capture every natural impression in the simplest way, freshly and immediately.

If drawing belongs to the world of spirit and color to that of the senses, you must draw first to cultivate the spirit.

The splitting up of color [as Impressionists did] brought the splitting up of form and contour . . . Everything is reduced to a mere sensation of the retina, but one which destroys all tranquility of surface and contour. Objects are differentiated only by the luminosity that is given them.

The eye can travel over the surface in a way parallel to the way it moves over nature. It should feel caressed and soothed, experience frictions and ruptures, glide and drift. One moment, there will be nothing to look at and the next second the canvas seems to refill, to be crowded with visual events.

Drawing and color are by no means two different things. As you paint, you draw... When color is at its richest, form is at its fullest.

Painting does not come from intelligence so much, as from sight and feeling and invention.

Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet.

Colors produce a spiritual vibration, the impression they create is important only as a step towards this vibration.